The article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations of forecasting the transformation of the modern political world order, and analyzes alternative scenarios of overcoming the modern crisis of global controllability. Particular attention is paid to identifying latent opportunities for evolutionary self-transformation of the modern world and the conditions for their actualization and activation. Among the priorities of the author’s analysis are the nature of the modern state and the evolutionary changes that its basic national-territorial model has undergone over the past century, and at the same time, the features of new systemic practices of modern state building that go beyond the previously universally recognized regulatory institutional framework. The essence of the modern crisis, according to the author, is reduced to overcoming the unipolar dysfunction that arose as a result of the collapse of the bipolar system and, paradoxically, became the crown of development of a pluralistic international system of democratic nation-states. A striking manifestation of this dysfunction is, on the one hand, the growing discrepancy between the capabilities of the national-territorial model of statehood and the development needs of the communities of the modern world, and on the other, the insurmountable problem of translating global leadership: this problem diagnoses the fundamental inadequacy of the hierarchical principle of world order in relation to today’s global governance tasks. The ineffectiveness of previously practiced techniques and the lack of new effective development strategies, acceptable to all the main subjects of world politics, forms the situation of global interlude, expectations and delayed action for the foreseeable future.